In a nursing home, a supervisory nurse or other healthcare professional is responsible for managing the work of several nursing assistants, assessing patient needs, and providing additional patient care. Nursing assistants are responsible for conducting or assisting with patients' “activities of daily living”, which include but are not limited to bathing, dressing, grooming, meals, and transfers. All work must be documented for regulatory and legal reasons.
Documenting patient care is a time consuming task that is traditionally performed with pen and paper and that takes away from time spent with patients. Moreover, such “manual documentation” is often illegible. Staff learns their care plans by reading paper-based plans that are constantly being updated or by talking to the nurse. They do not always have the most up-to-date information.
Recently, wall mounted computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs) have been used by staff in some facilities to enter patient data. Such systems are extremely challenging and stressful for nursing assistants, who typically fear technology or may otherwise find such technology difficult to use.
Also, PDAs have small keys that are difficult to use and small screens that are difficult to read. Wall mounted computers cannot be located at an ergonomically correct height for all staff, and compliance with legislation (e.g., Health Insurance Portability and Privacy Act) that protects patient privacy is problematic. Further, touch screen versions of wall mounted computers promote bacteria transmission by the staff who use them. Bedside computers offer a more costly alternative and do not resolve the problems with training staff on computer use and the spread of infections.
Staff also needs to communicate with each other to discuss observations or to request assistance with patient care. The present alternatives, such as searching the corridors and rooms, yelling down the hall, or using a traditional speaker based paging system, are time consuming, noisy, and disruptive, and intercom systems used at some facilities require the staff to be physically near the intercom terminals when help is needed.
In addition, staff requires constant training to keep up with new methods and healthcare advances. This training is traditionally accomplished in person and occasionally with audio and video tapes and other presentation equipment. As a result, current training methods require the staff to be in a location where they are unable to provide patient care.
Moreover, nurses communicate with physicians and family members of their patients in person and by phone while referring to paper based charts. It is often time consuming to find the charts, which may be in use by others. In addition, information from paper based charts that is entered into a computer system is typically several days out of date.
Therefore, it would be desirable for the long-term care industry and other care providing environments to have a lightweight, mobile, voice-activated, hands-free technology for improved documentation, communication, information dissemination, and education. It would also be desirable for this technology to operate in real time so that the staff is always working with up-to-date information, and the information is readily available in some form to all authorized persons.
The present invention presents a novel way of overcoming one or more of these or other problems.